The Problem With Calling Everything Sustainable
Sustainable water bottles. Sustainable airlines. Sustainable fast fashion. Sustainable cryptocurrency. The word has been applied to so many things, by so many organisations with such varied levels of commitment, that it has lost most of its descriptive power. A term that was meant to signal a meaningful relationship between economic activity and ecological limits has become a marketing category.
This is not an accident. It is the predictable result of a decade in which sustainability claims carried reputational upside with minimal accountability. Consumers rewarded the language of sustainability. Investors rewarded it. Procurement teams asked for it. Nobody, at first, had robust systems for verifying it. So it spread.
The Cost of Inflation
The inflation of sustainability language has real costs. The most obvious is that it becomes harder for genuinely committed organisations to differentiate themselves. If every company claims to be on a path to net zero, the claim carries no signal value, and the companies that have made genuine structural changes receive no premium for having done so.
A subtler cost is the effect on public trust. When people encounter sustainability claims that turn out to be misleading, the rational response is scepticism toward all such claims, including credible ones. Greenwash does not just damage the reputation of the company that practices it. It corrodes the credibility of the entire category.
Regulation Is Catching Up
In several major markets, regulators are beginning to set enforceable standards for sustainability claims. The European Union’s Green Claims Directive, proposed in 2023, would require companies to substantiate environmental claims with evidence before making them. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has issued guidance on green claims and has taken enforcement action against several companies for misleading environmental marketing.
These are welcome developments. The challenge is that regulation moves slowly, varies by jurisdiction, and tends to focus on the most egregious cases rather than the ambient inflation of language that is the bigger systemic problem.
What Organisations Can Do Now
The most useful thing an organisation can do is to stop using sustainability as an unqualified adjective and start being specific. Not sustainable products, but products made with recycled content meeting a defined percentage threshold. Not a sustainable supply chain, but a supply chain in which X percent of tier-one suppliers have been audited against a named standard.
Specificity is harder than aspiration. It requires measurement, verification, and the willingness to acknowledge gaps. It also tends to be more credible, more durable, and more useful to the people making decisions based on the information.
The word sustainable may be too damaged to recover. What matters more is the practice it was supposed to describe. That practice is still worth pursuing, even if the label that once distinguished it has been stretched beyond recognition.